Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey(10 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Davey
I am sure that the hon. Lady welcomes the many ECO measures in her constituency. The ECO measures that we announced in December prolong the programme for two more years and have a particular focus on fuel poverty, which I would hope that she welcomes. We will announce quite soon our proposals on incentives for people who want to invest in green deal measures, through which I am sure she will see real benefits for solid wall.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
I welcome the news that the energy company obligation scheme will offer targeted support to low-income households until at least March 2017. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is often the poorest families who live in the worst insulated and hardest-to-heat homes, and that these targeted measures have the potential greatly to reduce energy costs in such difficult-to-reach houses?
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As a result of our changes, we believe that more ECO measures will help more households. The fact that we have managed to ensure that the affordable warmth and carbon-saving community obligation aspects of the ECO will be extended at the existing rate for two more years is extremely good news for our efforts on fuel poverty.
Energy Bills
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey
Mr Davey
I am more impressed by what people do when they are in office. The Leader of the Opposition did nothing on competition when he was in office. He helped create the big six and he kept them in business. Frankly, we would like an apology from him and his party for the way they sucked up to the big six.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that, while it is right to take action to reduce energy bills, the only sustainable way to raise the living standards of hard-working families is by sticking to this Government’s long-term economic plans of deficit reduction and creating a responsible recovery?
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. It is vital that we do everything we can on energy bills, as we have announced today, but it is equally vital that we make sure we run the economy in a sustainable way. When we came to power, inflation was 3.5% and rising; now it is 2% and falling. By tackling the cost of living and inflation, we are delivering real help to people. That is why disposable incomes for UK households are higher now than in any year between 1997 and 2010.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey
Mr Davey
The idea that energy-intensive industries are not getting some of the support is not true. Payments under the scheme of compensation for the indirect costs of the EU emissions trading system are being made. It is true that the proposals for compensation for the carbon price floor are still going through the state aid process. However, we have a scheme that will come out and people will get those payments.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
T2. Will the Secretary of State reassure the House that neither he nor his Department would seek to block the production of any Government report on the impact of energy infrastructure and specifically the planned Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report on the correlation between onshore wind and residential property values?
UK Nuclear Energy Programme
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey
Mr Davey
That is a fair question. I mentioned three figures on jobs: over the lifetime of construction, we expect 25,000 jobs to be created; at peak, on site, there will be 5,600; and when the plant is finished and starts generating at full capacity, we expect there to be 900 full-time permanent jobs. They are different figures, but they are also very impressive figures.
I am afraid we have not done the analysis on how many of those jobs will be done by UK passport holders, but we expect a lot of them to be British. One reason EDF is investing in the local college is to bring on apprentices and young people in the area so that they can be the trained nuclear engineers of the future, working at Hinkley Point C and beyond.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
My right hon. Friend rightly stated that energy security relied on diversity of supply, so does he agree that consumers and the industry will be relieved that, thanks to his decision, new nuclear will form a large and reliable proportion of that supply?
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend is right that diversity is critical if we are to keep prices down. I am obsessed with ensuring that we get a good deal for the consumer and British industry, and part of that strategy is to ensure we have diversity, so that technologies and companies are competing and we are also applying downward pressure on prices.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Davey
The hon. Gentleman will know that the vast majority of the rises in people’s bills have come from wholesale prices, as he said, and network cost rises. He should know that a bill is made up of a host of things: the biggest portion is wholesale and the next biggest is network cost. They are the big cost measures that people are unfortunately experiencing.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
T7. In my constituency there are two major brick-manufacturing companies. As hon. Members will know, brick making is highly energy-intensive, and I am concerned that, without action, increased energy costs will make their product potentially unaffordable to the construction industry, which is getting on with the essential task of building the homes we desperately need. What is my right hon. Friend doing to address this urgent and pressing issue?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
9. What steps he is taking to meet future energy demand.
The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)
The Government published their energy security strategy in November 2012, and on 27 June, along with Ofgem and National Grid, we announced decisions on the capacity market and the use of National Grid’s existing system-balancing powers to secure the electricity supply in both the short and longer terms.
Mr Davey
I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. It is important that we take action on both the demand and the supply side. With Ofgem and National Grid’s proposals, which are out to consultation, we will see measures on the supply and demand side in the short term, and of course our proposal for a capacity market will do that in the medium term. I hope that he realises that we are looking at every single measure in a very structured way.
Andrew Bridgen
Given the projected energy gap, the time scales involved and the growth in the economy, does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government should encourage further construction of gas power stations, especially given the potential exploitation of shale gas in the near future?
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend will know that we have done an awful lot to ensure clarity in the strategy to encourage private investment. As he will know, it is not for the Government to build gas power stations, but our gas generation strategy set out a long-term framework for gas investment last year, and with the announcement of the capacity market on 27 June, I think we have a process for encouraging that investment.
Gangmasters Licensing (Extension to Construction Industry) Bill
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey
Mr Davey
The hon. Gentleman tempts me to sit down, but I will not be doing so quite yet because it is important to put the Government’s position on the record. I wish to say a few things that I think will have made his efforts worth while.
This Government, too, are committed to improving health and safety, particularly in construction, to ensuring fairness in the workplace and to encouraging and raising levels of compliance with workplace rights, in the construction sector and elsewhere. Where we differ with the hon. Gentleman is on whether licensing would be an effective solution to problems in the construction sector. Of course, licensing has its place as a tool in the regulatory arsenal. It is used in relation to labour providers in agriculture and food processing, as he said, and there are other examples too. However, licensing is an expensive and untargeted system of regulation. It burdens all with fees and inspections—the good and the bad alike—and with the risk that the worst businesses evade licensing altogether. Licensing can be an appropriate response to particular problems in particular sectors, but that does not mean it is appropriate in all cases.
Andrew Bridgen
I declare an interest, as I am a major shareholder in a food processing business in my constituency. North West Leicestershire is a major provider of building materials and is the base for many large construction companies, as hon. Members are perhaps aware. There is a huge difference between the agricultural and food processing industry and the construction industry, and therefore in the regulatory burden that those industries can carry. The food and food processing industry is a non-cyclical business—parts of it can even be counter-cyclical—and has been almost unaffected by the economic downtown, whereas we know that we cannot say that of the construction industry. I am very worried that any further burdens on the construction industry at this particular time, when it is struggling to deal with the effects of the last recession, could be particularly burdensome. It is not fair to compare the construction industry now with the more resilient food processing industry.
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend is exactly right in his analysis of the construction industry and of how we use licensing as one of the tools to deal with everything from health and safety to fairness in the workplace. We need to consider the conditions that need to be met before something such as licensing is appropriate. We need to consider whether existing enforcement arrangements are inadequate; whether there is hard evidence of illegal activity; where a licensing system would be a proportionate and effective way of tackling the problems that are seen; and where licensing would be practicable, enforceable and, finally, affordable. The Government do not consider that those tests have been met for the construction sector.
There is a misapprehension in some quarters that employment agencies that supply labour to the construction sector are unregulated, and that workers are unprotected. In fact, regulatory safeguards are already in place for all agency workers, whichever sector they work in. For example, employment agencies operating outside the Gangmasters Licensing Authority’s sectors have to comply with health and safety and working time legislation enforced by the Health and Safety Executive. They must also comply with the national minimum wage regulations enforced by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. In addition, they must adhere to special employment agency regulations enforced by my Department’s employment agency standards inspectorate—the EAS—which responds to complaints from agency workers, and carries out an additional programme of proactive, risk-assessed inspections each year.
On health and safety legislation and the work of the HSE in the construction sector, the hon. Member for Midlothian is rightly worried about health and safety, which is a big concern for the sector, but I am not convinced that a licensing system would improve the sector’s health and safety record. The GLA applies a range of licensing standards. The conditions for health and safety are intended to ensure agreement between the labour supplier and the hirer about who will have responsibility for managing day-to-day health and safety, including the preparation of risk assessments, but that is already clear in construction.
Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2007, the principal contractor has responsibilities for ensuring the health and safety of all individuals who work on a construction site regardless of their employment status. This includes directly employed workers, labour-only sub-contractors and the self-employed. In addition, each contractor working under the principal contractor has duties to every individual working under their control. Those duties are on top of the requirements that individual employers have to their employees. Duties of the principal contractor include the requirement to consult all workers involved in a project to ensure that the measures taken to protect their health and safety are effective.
Daylight Saving Bill
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey
Mr Davey
If my hon. Friend will have a little patience, I hope that he will react positively to some of my later remarks.
Our quandary is this: we appreciate the benefits that the change could bring, but we do not want any one community to be disadvantaged, or for its members to feel that they have had such a fundamental change to their daily lives foisted upon them.
There have been regular debates about the benefits of the change advocated by the hon. Member for Castle Point. Trying to change the clocks is, as I said, not a new idea. It is more than 40 years since an attempt was made to move away from Greenwich mean time in the winter months as well as the summer throughout the UK. Between 27 October 1968 and 31 October 1971 an experiment was conducted, and summer time—that is, Greenwich mean time plus 1 hour—was adopted throughout the year in order to test public opinion about continuous summer time. Although this was British summer time all the year round, it was known as British standard time.
There were two general arguments for a move to British standard time. The first was that the move would avoid the inconvenience of changing the clocks in the spring and autumn. The second depended on the fact that in those days most of our trading partners on the European mainland were on central European time throughout the year, the concept of summer time not being one that we had managed to sell to them at that time. So by adopting permanent British summer time, we brought ourselves into line with those countries at a time when we were eager to increase trade with our European neighbours, and at a time before e-mail and other technology made communication possible at any time of day or night.
Consultations carried out by the Government in 1966, before the experiment to change to British summer time throughout the year, revealed the divergence of opinion between the majority of people in England and Wales, who favoured British standard time all year round, and those in Scotland and the north of England, who were opposed. Nevertheless, the experiment went ahead and lasted for three years. A review of the experiment was conducted in the winter months of 1968-69 and 1969-70. The review found that it was impossible to quantify at that time many of the more important claims about the advantages and disadvantages of British standard time.
However, what the review did reveal was the many practical objections that were raised by the farming and construction industries and others involved in outdoor work, such as road maintenance workers, postal workers and dairy workers, particularly in the north of England and Scotland, who claimed that the change caused discomfort and inconvenience because of the late sunrise in winter. They also claimed that they could not easily change their working hours because of public demand for early services. Those objections would probably have less force today as the economy is less dependent on agriculture, and equipment can operate at night, but they are still a factor.
There was also concern about hazards to schoolchildren particularly in rural areas, who would be going off to school up to an hour and a half before dawn. We have heard much about that argument today. It appears that any increase in road casualties in the mornings would be at least offset by reductions in the evenings, but significant concerns about that remain, particularly in more northern areas.
Following a free vote—I repeat, a free vote—in Parliament on 2 December 1970, the House voted by the decisive margin of 366 to 81 to revert to the current arrangements. There must have been some weight behind that decision if, having lived through the experiment for three years, so many Members in all parts of the House were not persuaded. Portugal did exactly the same after it experienced four years of a similar experiment.
If we want to get a more recent idea of how a change to our summer time arrangements might impact on the United Kingdom, we can look to Portugal, which moved to central European time in 1992. Of course Portugal is in a different geographical location from us, but being at the westerly extremity of Europe it is currently on the same time zone as the UK and Ireland. Since most of its trade is with the European Union, its Government decided, as we had in the 1960s, that it would be beneficial to be in the same time zone as its neighbours and trading partners. The experiment was abandoned in 1996 and Portugal reverted to GMT because its population decided that the gains of lighter evenings were not, in the end, offset by the pain of darker mornings. So perhaps the change did not bring all the benefits that were hoped for, which highlights the practical reality and consequences of an actual change.
Some of the complaints resulting from the Portuguese experiment were not necessarily ones that I had immediately thought of. For example, the light summer evenings apparently had a disturbing effect on children’s sleeping habits, which in turn led to poor performance in school and lack of concentration. Pollution from road traffic increased as the rush hour in the summer months coincided with the hotter times of the day. Let us remember that these are actual findings from an actual experiment.
Perhaps more importantly, Portugal found that the energy savings arguments were relatively weak. The intended savings in household electricity consumption were disappointingly low as, according to the report, the change resulted in an “insignificant saving.” It would appear that the extension of daylight hours meant that people tended to engage in other leisure activities after work, which might have been good for the leisure and tourism industry but unfortunately led to higher energy consumption.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Will the Minister speed up his statement? Many Members on both sides would like to get home before it gets dark.
Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Ed Davey
Mr Davey
My interpretation of the fact that there are some cases before the European Court of Human Rights is that we do not need the legislation at all. Those court cases are dealing with the issues of uncertainty that remain and the case law is helping to develop the situation.
Andrew Bridgen
Will the Minister shed some light on whether we need this Bill and whether there is any requirement for it? Is he aware of the proportion of ballots by unions that have been challenged legally?
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend anticipates what I was about to say. Although it is true that in recent years there have been more applications for court injunctions, we must put that increase into some perspective. It is still relatively rare for the courts to intervene in industrial disputes. Over the past five years, just seven injunctions have been sought, on average, per year. During the five years from 2005 to 2009, there were on average 132 work stoppages each year. With an average of seven injunctions and 132 work stoppages, it is clearly not the case that employers are always going to court and that it is difficult for trade unions to ballot their members, give notices in the proper way and hold industrial action when their members so vote. I am afraid that the facts are entirely against the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington.
Moreover, these cases have not always gone the way of the employer, even when there have been injunctions, as my hon. Friends have said. The Bill’s explanatory notes refer to the case of British Airways v. Unite. That case concerned the way that the union notified its members about the outcome of an industrial action ballot. On this occasion, the Court of Appeal upheld the union’s appeal and the injunction was overturned.
There are of course other cases in which the trade union lost. Reference has been made to another case involving British Airways and Unite. I freely acknowledge that most balloting processes across our society will contain some flaws. Existing industrial action law makes some allowance for such small errors, but in the case of British Airways v. Unite that Unite lost, the union had made serious mistakes in the balloting process and a large number of people were mistakenly accorded an entitlement to vote. We are talking about a tightly knit group of workers, all belonging to the same, very well-resourced, branch of the Unite union. The union should have known better. Frankly, the union got it wrong and, quite rightly, it had to rerun the ballot.
Mr Davey
I am grateful for all the interventions, but I want to present my arguments because there are genuine concerns about the Bill that the coalition partners share, and it is important to put them to the House.
We have serious difficulties with the proposal to reverse the burden of proof. To date, in any proceedings, once the employer has established that there has been a breach of the safeguards, the burden shifts to the union wishing to avail itself of the statutory defence to establish whether section 232B applies. That is consistent with the rules on the burden of proof: the burden generally lies on the party making the proposition. However, the Bill contravenes that general rule of evidence. In addition, it ignores another general rule that parties are not required to establish a negative. Under the Bill, the employer has to establish that the breach does not qualify for the disregard under section 232B. On a practical level, it is unrealistic and unfair to imply a level of knowledge on the part of the employer, which enables the employer to show not only that the law has been broken, but that the lack of compliance is substantial and meets certain thresholds.
Andrew Bridgen
As the Minister said, it is difficult to prove a negative. Also, the burden of proof will be on the employers, yet the unions will have all the information that the employers require to reach such a conclusion.
Mr Davey
I listened to my hon. Friend when he expanded on that point in the debate and he was spot on. It would be a bizarre shift in the law. As one of his colleagues said, it would create a lawyers’ charter.
Let me summarise the Government’s response to the Bill. Broadly speaking, there is a disconnect between the measure and the modern world of industrial relations. It will do nothing to shift employment relations on to the new ground of employee engagement.
At this time, we need all employers and all workers to pull together in a common cause to lift individual businesses and the economy at large out of the doldrums of weak growth. We need to pull everyone together in that effort. I want trade unions, as well, to exert their positive influence. The forward-looking agenda is theirs, too. They should adopt their rightful place and be on the inside of the debates. I greatly hope that they will engage with the Government at all levels.
In contrast, the Bill is about division at the workplace, and its effect would be to deepen those divisions by encouraging more strikes and other forms of industrial action. Contrary to the views of its supporters, the Bill proposes a major shift in the balance of the law. There is no consensus in our society for such a shift. In fact, employers believe that we should move in the opposite direction.
Successive Governments, with the previous Government very much to the fore, did not want to unsettle the balance of the law on industrial relations. The coalition Government share that mainstream view. We therefore have no current plans to change industrial action law either in the direction proposed by the Bill or in that proposed by others.
The case that the Bill’s supporters presented for changing the law is not compelling. The legal framework has been in place for many years, and there is no evidence that it causes problems for trade unions that efficiently go about their lawful business. Parties should know what is needed to comply with the law.
The Bill itself has major defects in its drafting and would encourage undemocratic and coercive behaviour by trade unions. Sadly, it is not a Bill that the Government can support. I therefore ask hon. Members to vote against Second Reading.